Friday the 13th Lives Up to Its Dubious Distinction, Oshkosh Hit Hard

Updated storm potential as of 10 a.m. Friday

I am not superstitious but maybe I should be. It will be our 9th Friday in a row with rain. That is fact! The other 8 Fridays did not occur on the 13th but this has become much more than a trend or pattern. It seems you can set your watch to the storms every Friday and today will be no different. I think we could have several rounds of thunderstorms today. We woke up with thunder as expected this morning. We will likely have another round by mid-afternoon, and a third round of thunderstorms during the evening. The sun is out and destabilizing the atmosphere.
Oshkosh, Wisconsin was hit hard last night with flooding and a tornado was reported in Mayville off Highway 67. These are areas I am familiar with and had play by play reports from family on the phone last night. Everybody is okay up there, but there is plenty of flooding and many folks could not even get into their neighborhoods. Sound familiar. The red areas indicate doppler estimated rainfall amounts from the Green Bay National Weather Service Office in the 2 to 4 inch range. The purple areas were swamped with between 4 and 6 inches of rain! I am glad everybody is safe. I show you this because I am really worried about training thunderstorms and flooding here at home tonight and already we have flash flood watches out for much of our viewing area. I know the forecast is calling for one to two inches of rain, but we all know with thunderstorms there can be locally higher amounts.

One of the problems with our front is that it will be moving through our area today at less than 10 mph. I could whip right by it on my gas-saving bicycle. This front will be paralleling our upper-level winds and at the same time it is dying out. These ingredients add up to a flood threat. This brings us to our second threat which will be wind damage.

If there is good news the lower level and mid-level winds are much weaker than last Friday by a good 15 to 25 mph. This means I do not expect a repeat of 80 mph wind gusts that ravaged areas of Crawfordsville and Frankfort. The wind is also unidirection from the surface to the upper-levels which tells me that our tornado threat will remain low. But here in Indiana we never say never when it comes to tornadoes and any severe thunderstorm has the potential of putting down a tornado. Now today as a surface wave moves along our dying front it could help add some shear to the environment which could put down a lone EF-0 tornado or gustnado most likely with wind speeds less than 85 mph. We are not expecting any of those devastating tornadoes we saw across the Plains on Wednesday night. We will keep you updated with Live Doppler 18 and Precision 18. Have that plan B and stay tuned and calm. Let me break down the percentages for you as of 10:20 a.m. This has the potential of occurring within 25 miles of your neighborhood:

Wind gusts of 35 to 45 mph: 55%

Wind gusts of 46 to 55 mph: 40%

Wind gusts of 58 mph or higher: 30%

Rainfall in excess of 2 inches: 40%

Rainfall in excess of 1 inch: 60%

Tornado EF-0: 5%

Tornado EF-1 (less than 2%)

Small hail: 10%

Large hail: 5% or less